


empty spaces

by Tinwoman



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: "Got A Suit? Then Suit Up", F/F, Gen, Spoilers S2E25, Swearing, but fun's fun, this will definitely be Jossed by next week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 02:25:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15208775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tinwoman/pseuds/Tinwoman
Summary: The morning after.





	empty spaces

Beau wakes to the smell of ash and blood.

It’s still mostly dark — the sky is a dark-steel grey, cold pre-dawn light filtering through the clouds — and for half a moment Beau is groggily grateful that someone must have taken a longer watch to let the rest of them get some sleep. But when her vision focuses, when her brain clicks on like the clean snap of a dry twig, she bolts upright with her staff in her hand. There’s no one in front of the fire — there’s no _fire_ , the wood sitting blackened and cold in front of her — and a heavy dread begins to knot in her stomach and curl outward.

She glances around quickly, scanning the area for any sign of trouble and counting the people sleeping on the ground in front of her. _Three short. Fuck. Fuck._

“Wake up,” she says loudly, nudging the nearest sleeping form hard with her staff. “Hey, wake _up_ , something’s wrong.”

A muffled sound of protest, a sleepy ‘huh?’ from Caleb, but within seconds the rest of them scramble to their feet. Caleb spends a few moments groping for his spellbook in the semi-darkness, but Nott’s scanning the edges of their campsite with quick, subtle movements and Molly draws his sword instinctively into a loose, ready battle stance almost before his eyes are fully open.

She opens her mouth to tell them, to blurt out the fear building hot and fluttering in her chest, but Molly beats her to it.

“Wait, where’s…” Molly says, and Beau can see it click into place, can see his shoulders tense and his head whip around with an almost frantic twitch. “No. No, no, no. Yasha…but Fjord and Jester wouldn’t…”

Caleb is standing quietly, watching them with solem, careful eyes, and when Molly whirls around to examine the place Yasha had claimed as her own Beau can feel the air leave her lungs in a rush. _Welcome to the party, pal,_ she thinks, her mind still racing, part of her still clinging to sleep and wishing this was a weird, bad dream.

“Look, there’s something like footprints…” Nott says quietly, and Beau files away for later how calm Nott is in a crisis, how her anxious fidgeting goes almost blank in the face of other people’s distress.

Caleb’s still not speaking, and Beau glances over to him. Not concern, he’s a grown-ass man, but just, you know. Making sure their Mr. Smarty-Pants is keeping up with the rest of them and not shutting down or going all catatonic on them.

“Caleb?” Nott asks, and reaches out for him.

_She’s got him. Good._

Beau ignores them and takes three quick steps to the matted, scuffed up ground that Nott had been pointing to. A fight, she thinks, though she’s not exactly an expert tracker. Imprints like the strike of metal boots, flattened vegetation that might have been some sort of cart, and…blood. Blood on the ground, arcing in splatters and drying in small pools, and Beau blinks back the sudden, roaring rise of panic-tinged anger at the back of her throat.

Molly’s beside her suddenly, his red eyes intent and his expression serious and focused in a way Beau’s never seen, not even in battle. He presses a hand into the ground, his sharp fingernails digging tiny grooves into the soft ground.

“An altercation?” he says, the playful lilt of his accent flattened almost to nothing.

“Must be. Someone must’ve grabbed them; Fjord and Jester, I mean. Yasha was on watch, but she might have…” Beau hesitates, because she’s learned the hard way that it’s entirely possible to have a huge crush on someone without really knowing them at all, and well...Yasha _leaves_.

“She wouldn’t have let anyone take them,” Molly says sharply, a whipcrack in the damp morning air. “If someone took Fjord and Jester and she’s not here, then they got her too.”

“Okay, okay,” Beau says, struggling to keep her voice quiet and calm, biting back the urge to snap back at the slightest hint of conflict. Her breath is slow in her lungs, heavy and thick. “I wasn’t saying — I only meant — forget it —”

_Fucked it up again._ Just too many fucking _words_ , especially with Molly, and Beau’s always been shit at making herself understood. It’s better with Fjord and Jester, those two could hop around her verbal potholes with ease, and Yasha…Yasha...

Beau grits her teeth, hard. _Stop it. Stop it._

“Can you track them?” she says instead, and Molly squints, his red eyes still a little unsettling even after all these weeks.

“Maybe,” he says distantly, but before he can say more Caleb is suddenly behind them both, his voice soft.

“They’re gone,” he says. “I just tried to locate them, but there’s...there’s nothing.”

“What?” Beau says, swiveling to face him so fast that he takes a step back, looking a little alarmed. “What do you mean, you tried to locate them?”

“With magic,” Caleb says, shrugging one shoulder helplessly. “I cast the spell to focus on an object, and...and didn’t get anything back. They’re far away, farther than the spell can reach.”

Molly sucks in a quick, despairing breath, and Beau shakes her head. “No. No, they’re not gone, Caleb. They’re...they’re missing, they’ve been kidnapped, we have to find them —”

“Beau,” Nott says, using her extra-gentle voice that she normally reserves for Caleb. “Beau, we can’t —”

“Can’t what?” Molly says, stepping a little closer to Beau, shifting his sword a little higher. “We have to find them. _Now._ Beau’s right — one little spell misfire and we’re what, giving up?”

Beau glances at him, quick and grateful, and the tiny tip of a smile he sends in her direction makes her chest tighten with a weird, completely inappropriate pulse of happiness. It’s nice, is all. To have someone on her side.

“We’re not giving up,” Caleb says. “We just...we’re on a deadline with a dangerous man. If they were close, we could try —”

“Who gives a _fuck_ about the Gentleman right now?” Beau interrupts loudly, and a few birds scatter into the air from the nearest tree. “Our _friends_ are missing, in danger — look, there’s blood all over the goddamn ground here!”

“I _know_ that, Beauregard,” Caleb says, voice going tight and pinched. “And we can keep looking for them, but we can’t just stop what we’re doing while someone has vials of our blood —”

“Fuck the Gentleman,” Molly says, eyes flashing dangerously. “He can come after us too for all I care, I’m not leaving Yasha —”

“No one is leaving anyone,” Nott says firmly, moving as if to step between the three of them. “Be sensible. Be _smart_. We can’t just fly off the handle —”

Beau feels a frustrated scream clawing at her throat, and she folds her arms over her chest as if to keep the thrumming energy trapped in her body. _It had to be the three of them that went missing, didn’t it,_ she thinks viciously. _Two best friends and Would-Be Girlfriend. Couldn’t’ve been these three instead. Fuck, it couldn’t’ve been me._

“You two can do what you want,” Molly says, his mouth twisting into a mocking, fuck-you smile. “Beau, you coming with me?”

“No!” Caleb says, almost shouting, and Beau can see the angry flush staining his cheeks. “Please, just...just think about this. We made a blood oath to complete a task for someone who has no problem killing us just to prove a point, and we’re almost done, ya? And we won’t be any good to them if we’re dragged back to Zadash in chains.”

Beau tightens her grip on her staff, the familiar smooth texture slipping against her palm. He has a point, she knows he does, but every instinct in her is screaming to act, to _do_ something, to follow the matted grass until she finds something to rip apart with her bare hands. Molly’s quiet, even breaths help steady her, and she wonders fleetingly how Molly could’ve become both intense irritant and stabilizing presence all at once.

“We _will_ find them, I promise you,” Caleb says, grabbing her and Molly’s hands, Nott still standing between them. “And whoever took them will wish to the gods they hadn’t, but first we need to gather as much info as we can and finish the job.”

And fuck her sideways, but for a moment Beau would swear she can _feel_ the fire burning under Caleb’s skin, the rage and sorrow that fill him up like straw in a scarecrow, and that more than anything convinces her that he might be right, that he’s with them even if he’s playing it safe and careful like fucking always.

Molly glances over at her, his sharp teeth catching his bottom lip in an oddly sweet gesture of uncertainty. Beau breathes out slow, her hand still in Caleb’s, and nods once.

“Fine. Fine,” Beau says. “But this is in and out, okay? Finish this and then we don’t stop until we find them.”

“We can probably find out more information once we get to Shady Creek Run anyway,” Nott says carefully, eyes huge and luminous in her small face. “If anyone’s got information on kidnappers or slavers, it’ll be that sort of folk.”

Molly sighs, heavy and slow. “You’re right. Damnit, you’re both right. Let’s get moving, then. The quicker the better.”

“Good. Yes,” Caleb says, shoulders slumping with relief as he releases their hands. “We’ll learn everything we can here, and then we’ll rescue our friends.”

“And kill any motherfucker that laid a finger on them,” Beau says, and the low, dangerous chuckle from Molly has her grinning back at him.

“And kill any motherfucker that laid a finger on them,” Caleb says, hard and determined, and Nott’s ears flick flat against her head.

“No one hurts our friends,” Nott says, and her expression flickers into something needle-sharp and nightmare-made, shadows pooling under her eyes and in the corners of her mouth.

Beau breathes out again, her skin humming with adrenaline.

“The Mighty Nein,” she says, putting her hand in the center of their makeshift circle.

The joke was always that they were missing people, that they were two friends short, and all of a sudden it feels like a prophecy, like a cruel joke. _We’re getting them back. I don’t care what we have to do, we are not leaving them._

“The Mighty Nein,” Molly says, his tattooed hand on top of hers, his lavender skin glimmering in the early morning light.

“The Mighty Nein,” Caleb and Nott say, almost in unison, and Beau closes her eyes and tries to memorize this feeling, her friends closing ranks around each other, the promise in their words run like steel through her backbone, her heart.

“Let’s go kick some ass.”

**Author's Note:**

> Writer's Block has me in its cold grip, please enjoy this little snippet of me re-teaching myself how to write sentences. 
> 
> I've got a [tumblr](http://tinwomanrunaway.tumblr.com/) where I'm marginally more coherent.


End file.
